The Forthcoming Unreal Engine 5 Will Usher in a New Immersive Age for Gaming, Film and Television

I must confess that my gaming days are largely behind me - while I do dabble occasionally - but I certainly continue to keep tabs on the latest gaming developments. The recent Unreal 5 Engine Reveal - which demonstrates the latest iteration of that forthcoming graphics and sound engine running on the forthcoming PlayStation 5 platform is just stunning.

You can see how much incredible effort has been put into getting everything to behave more fluidly and naturally - from the look and function and feel of surfaces - to object interaction, light and motion reaction and all-immersive surround-sound. We’re also talking about super-high poly asset count - all those 3D polygonal objects rendered as billions of tiny vectorised triangles.

As teased in the title - this doesn’t just offer next-level realism and fluidity to games, but also for film and TV special effects - and even whole televisual and cinematic sequences. I foresee a time when actors simply communicate a set number of movements, gestures, vocalisations and idiosyncratic behaviours and the AI processes it all into fully-featured film sequences - with full dialogue and interactions. No need for weekly re-shoots and casts of 100’s to attend laborious sessions - instead you just set the engine to remodel it all in accordance with the new storyboard. That’s something of a futuristic extrapolation - but those days aren’t that far ahead.

The level of special effects and immersion in the best cinematic releases is already stellar - but those frame-by-frame methodologies are time-consuming, laborious and expensive. With increased AI and automation - and much improved natural smarts in these gaming engines - they can take on a huge range of tasks. I can see very high-resolution animations just being done directly and entirely on this essentially gaming software. And I can see certain trickier action and environmental scenes for film and television being reproduced entirely in this digital medium.

The Unreal Engine uses a number of smart component elements - Chaos Physics System, Convolution Reverb, Lumen Dynamic Global Lighting, Nanite Pixel Manipulation and Niagara Contextualized Object Movement and Interaction. The realm of real-time dynamic automated graphics manipulation is ascending to the next level - and I’m very excited by the potential here. Developers always take the technology to the next level and typically go way beyond what was intended - so it’s thrilling to see what will be created with this new system.

This will very likely wholly change the face of immersive entertainment - and be reflected in every day interactions for mobile phones, Netflix etc. The possibilities here are limitless! PlayStation 5 was due for release at the end of the year - while that will likely shift to 2021 - we’ll have to wait and see. We’ll need to wait until partway through 2021 in any case for the release of the Unreal Engine 5.